dream

I'm starting to toy with the idea of starting a separate blog to record the messed up dreams I have. But since I haven't yet, I'll post this one now.

I was on some sort of vacation with the women in my family (and one or two males, I think?) But somehow my cousin and I convinced our mothers (who were in charge) that we should rent motorcycles and tour the region we were in (I think it was Southish-- maybe Florida?) At any rate, I fell asleep in the dream and when I woke up, it was just my cousin and I, but they'd left us a motorcycle to share (and weird looking helmets). And there was a woman there, named Phyllis, that we were apparently related to. Except that she was crazy. And a vampire. But not one of those undead-must-stab-through-heart-vampires. She was mortal. And just fucking crazy. And evil. And she starts telling us this story about her life. And how she used to run a daycare and she'd drink the blood of the kids she'd watch (not enough to kill them) and how she had a lottery system set into place that involved these toys hanging on hooks on the wall, but the string used to attach them was attached to a spike that pulled out of the toy-- a single spike meant you were off the hook that week, but if you got a multi-pronged hook you were the lucky one. In the dream, she actually hands us two of the sheathed spikes, but we both come up with singles. And while she's telling us this story, my cousin and I somehow managed to get hold of knives (but they're little, like steak knives) and we're trying to hide them from her because we're not sure why she's telling us this story and if she intends to try and drink our blood and in my head in my dream I'm wondering the law would rule this as a moment of self defense. At that point I woke myself up.

Have I ever mentioned that most of my dreams seem to run like films? Films shot with multiple cameras and decent editing? And flashbacks. When she starts telling us the story about the spikes (which looked like short kabob sticks-- the metal, reusable kind), my dream went into a flashback so I could actually see the crying, terrified looks of the kids pulling toys off the hooks.

Good start to a day, eh?

What do you do when you don't know what to do?

thought on film

I saw Stardust Wednesday night. I don't make it into movie theatres very often, but I wanted to really try to see this film. I'm glad I did, I thought it was excellent.

Beyond that, the friend I saw it with and I sat there through the previews commenting on the sheer mass of previews for fantasy films. I remarked to her that fantasy is the new golden age of Hollywood. The original golden age of Hollywood, by my definition is that of the forties and fifties when things were vividly in technicolor, and Hollywood made an effort to be happy and innocent. Movies were our escape. (This is not to say that all films were this way, but that it was the overall mainstream feel of the era.)

I would be shocked to think that I was the first to have these thoughts, and would automatically assume that someone else has written about it more eloquently and intellecutally than I, but I progress: Fantasy is the new golden age of Hollywood because our cultural levels of despair, fear, and worldliness have reached a level at which we cannot suspend our disbelief to accept innocence as presented in our world because its so fleeting in our own lives. So, in order to reclaim the sense of innocence that functions as an emotional safety blanket, we create worlds of fantasy where danger and adventure may exist, but they exist in an overarching feeling of innocence.

Thoughts? Rebuttals?

Twelve hour work days on my feet outside in the cool are no fun. I really need to stop blithering away my days and do something constructive. Like write poetry.

Mantras.

Everyone should have at least one. And try to adhere to them.